Focus areas

Decision Support and Modeling

Develop tools that exploit diverse and disparate data sources in order to enhance end-user analytics, decision-making, and planning. Establish platforms that facilitate forward deployed and reach-back information sharing and collaboration capabilities. Create tools that provide operators and planners at the operational and tactical levels a better understanding of the operational environment, highlight first and higher order effects of alternate courses of action, and facilitate near real-time decisions within the context of the mission.

Explosive Materials Recovery and Disposal

Improve or develop desensitization, neutralization, and disposal tools and/or techniques for commercial and military explosives, homemade/improvised explosives, precursor materials, and enhanced payloads such as flammable liquids and gases.

Explosives and IED Threat Characterization

Create or improve tools and technologies that satisfy interagency and international requirements to address adaptive threats associated with criminal and terrorist use of explosives, homemade/improvised explosives and their precursors, and improvised and unconventional explosive devices and their components. Develop analytical tools and techniques that provide an understanding of how and why various IED components can be used in device construction to achieve intended effects and outcomes. Advance IED threat modeling to understand threat actors and their weaponeering strategies. Design and fabricate surrogates to simulate IED threats.

Produce applications for rapid and efficient dissemination of threat information regarding criminal and terrorist use of explosives, as well as technical information regarding IED construction and use. Formulate knowledge-based strategies necessary to improve IED response operations and transfer lessons learned between military and civilian IED response communities.

Ordnance Response Operations

Design and develop tools to locate and verify the presence of unexploded ordnance, technologies to identify type, condition, and nomenclature of unexploded ordnance and associated fuzing, technologies to enhance situational awareness and sustain operational capabilities during ordnance response operations, and tools and equipment for render safe, disruption and/or disposal operations. These tools and technologies must have application to a range of munitions, including munitions containing conventional and non-conventional fillers as well as munitions containing insensitive high explosives.